


Perspectives: The Liar Who Loves

by The_Peridot_Shade



Series: The Girl Who Broke The World and Other Alternate Histories [7]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Genre: Canon Intersex Character, Gen, Genderfluid Character, Lies, Love Is Terrifying When Applied To Certain Concepts, Metaphysics, Other Implied Trauma, Past Character Death, Past Murder, Physics, Reminder: Vivec is not a good person, Sacrificial ethics, Unreliable Narrator, but that doesn't exactly stop him/her, longer explanation within, my pronouns for Vivec are a fluid dichotomy like I headcanon his/her gender, past betrayal, self-awareness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-19 04:02:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29868852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Peridot_Shade/pseuds/The_Peridot_Shade
Summary: Vivec contributes his/her interpretation of the temporal disturbance.  It's a perspective that both poses very interesting questions that have not yet occurred to other characters—even those directly involved—and reveals a great deal about his/her mindset.Remember, however, that these are the words of a professional liar.
Relationships: Indoril Nerevar & Vivec
Series: The Girl Who Broke The World and Other Alternate Histories [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2091444
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	Perspectives: The Liar Who Loves

**Author's Note:**

> A note on Vivec's pronouns:  
> It's not particularly relevant to this particular installment of the series, but for future reference: Vivec, in my mind, is genderfluid, but unlike myself (I have a very nebulous experience of gender, rarely having any strong affiliation with male, female, or agender) has a clearly defined duality of his/her experience. It's explicitly part of his/her divine aspects, so I'm imagining his/her experience as more akin to flipping a coin from day to day. Still genderfluid, just a different way of experiencing it. When other POV characters are explicitly told which one Vivec is currently, they will use the appropriate singular pronoun, and otherwise will continue to use he/she until told which to use. Vivec's internal narrative will use the pronoun or term he/she currently deems appropriate.  
> Since Bethesda kinda screwed up on a thoughtful portrayal of intersex people's experience of gender, I've chosen to make it clear that Vivec's gender is a duality regardless of his/her experience of his/her body. Because there's no one universal trans or intersex experience, and I wish to respect that.
> 
> As far as other things to note go: Vivec is not a particularly good person and also has a past full of violence. He/she is also a chronic liar and EXTREMELY EXTRA. So the Unreliable Narrator and trauma-related tags are best heeded, though a lot is only implied.

These times are unprecedented, and yet not.  
I have lived through a Dragon Break. I have seen, experienced, brought into being all the many outcomes of my choices in a single, scarlet, crimson, blood-drenched moment. I have known what it is to stand at the epicenter of an event so vast the mortal mind cannot comprehend it and so seeks to hide from the pure, unvarnished, revealed truth.  
I was not alone in this experience. My siblings and I continue to perceive time…differently, as a result of our apotheosis.  
But we were not the only ones there.  
Somewhere, in whatever form they currently exist, Voryn, Kagrenac, Dumac, and Nerevar also know this. Somewhere, they too may perceive all that has come to pass and find it as unnatural as I.  
A Dragon Break is a disruption, a mistake, an interference. It seeks to correct itself, leaving a parallel outcome of each choice that is fundamentally the same regardless of the variations it may take in form. The Dragon Broke at Red Mountain, but regardless of how or why—Voryn, Nerevar, Dumac and Kagrenac always passed beyond reach, dead or missing. At our hands, at their own, at each other's, the end result is the same.  
This is not a Dragon Break. This is a departure from fate, an introduction of chaos and possibility. Whatever comes next shall be of mortal choosing. Informed choice.  
Time, in the mortal conception, is linear but cyclical. Fate rhymes, but events are immutable once perceived—and thereby actualized.  
Time in the immortal conception…is another beast entirely.  
I have known of Time's lack of linearity since I began my attempt to understand reality. Since I learned that reality is merely a matter of belief.  
I have shaped reality with my belief. I have drowned my land and saved my people from foe and depths alike, simply because I willed it…and I loved them.  
The power at work here calls upon that determination, that love, that madness. The spark of the divine within all things.  
This is not a break in time. This is a break in collective belief.  
Someone out there loved strongly enough, believed hard enough to strip away the lie of inability, impotence, hopelessness, inevitability.  
They made choice matter. Everything that becomes part of this reality will be a matter of mortal willpower. And that, it seems, may be just as potent as the power of the divine—perhaps even they are one and the same, drawing on the same boundless spark of creation.  
Lorkhan's power, Lorkhan's will, Lorkhan's love was enough to shape time and space. But it required sacrifice. Much that was his to give, yes, but also much that was not. He chose to give it all regardless.  
An old friend once told me that sacrifice has no meaning save for what is chosen; that all the prices we pay must have significance to us, or else there is no cost at all. No recompense for what we choose to give in others' stead, they said, can ever justify what necessity dictates. They always were an idealist, if a pragmatic one. Compassionate, passionate, just—but utterly ruthless in defense of their people, their homeland, their principles. Willing to pay any price.  
I both admired and envied them for it.  
I once paid a price of my own, and they bore the brunt of it. I broke my own heart in the process, because that act stripped away all the lies I ever told myself.  
About reality, yes. But also about love, friendship, my own being.  
I am dual-natured—gentle and savage, forthright and deceitful, creative and destructive, generous and avaricious. I have always been, in all my bitter history: slave-child, thief, warrior, poet, mystic, male and female both in form and in nature.  
But it took the dire consequences of my choices for me to realize that I am as vulnerable as I have always felt, yet in all my efforts to become less so…I have only expanded the ways in which I can be made to bleed.  
I can have no illusions, now, and it is both a heavy cost and a worthy one. Because Nerevar was right, all those years ago. Nothing can ever justify the life I stole from them.  
I do not even try. They are my foe, now. At best a reluctant ally; at worst an antagonist to tear down all I have built. Most likely, it will be both.  
But this is the coin in which I chose to pay for glory I could not have snatched from within their shadow, for adoration I yearned to give and receive.  
I cannot regret it. I cannot unmake it. I would not, regardless, for I have what I searched for.  
My price is paid, my choice written. But this temporal disturbance…I sense it could rewrite my tale, if the perpetrator wished. They do not care to, it seems, whoever they may be—or perhaps it is merely that the prerequisite changes have yet to be made. So much is uncertain. Sil is pleased, no doubt, but I remain wary. I see what no one else seems to: the sheer scope and power of the effects.  
I wonder…what choice did whoever is responsible for this phenomenon make, to cause such potent change? What did they gain from it?  
And what did they sacrifice in the process?


End file.
